Current state

Intro
I've been working on this project for over 18 months now, originally in Godot before deciding to switch over to Love2D late last year. The current state of the game is very bare bones, you can hire workers, design new products including hardware, software and facilities like a fabrication plants. Staff work on these products using their skills and whatever products they're given to do their job, you can manage contracts with facilities to produce hardware. There's no economic simulation yet, once a product is finished the only option available is to give it to your staff to improve their productivity.

Mods
The game is heavily focused on mods, the game itself is bare bones and lacks any gameplay. The base mod adds every product and in-game window currently featured in the game, without the mod there's no concept of computer hardware or software. The mods, like the game itself, is all composed of lua files, allowing for a high degree of freedom. It's entirely possible to create a mod that turns this game into a city mayor simulator or a bookstore simulator, or even add these layers of simulation to the already existing base mod. Themes are also lua based and highly flexible, the screenshots show the two themes I've created one inspired by the classic Mac System 7 and the other inspired by Windows 95.

Multiplayer
There's a client and server architecture in place but the server currently trusts everything the client sends it, while this is fine for single player it'd be a nightmare of cheats and broken gameplay if you wanted to host a public multiplayer game. Eventually I'll add in verification of data on the server to fix this and add in options for how turns are handled, right now a turn progresses once every player has indicated they are finished. I plan to add an option to progress turns after x amount of time, such as forcing a turn every 5 minutes whether every player has finished or not. This should allow for a larger number of players to join a game since you won't have to always be actively playing the game.

There's a lot more details I could go into, but I'll leave this for future posts since this one is getting rather long already. I'll try to post updates in a somewhat regular fashion, maybe once every month or two.

Focus
I'll end the post with the current near-term goals

• Improve the Product Designer UI, mostly in how updating existing products are handled, in particular I want to allow setting developer priorities for feature importance and stability.

• (Re-)implement an in-game console, the previous Godot builds had an in-game console accessible by pressing the ~ key. It was a glorified cheat system for quick debugging purposes, allowing me to finish products in development, change the quality of features etc.. Though eventually I plan to have it support legitimate gameplay options for players that want a text-based option.

• Product bug fixing. During the development of products, staff generate bugs that are randomly encountered but can't actually be fixed yet. I'll work on getting a QA team simulated to discover and fix these bugs.

• There's a long term goal to improve the user interface code which has taken a hit since the transition from Godot to Love2D. The current screenshots of the game are from the old Godot version so future screenshots will look a little rough until I implement a similar layout system as Godot used. Basically imagine controls like text and buttons not being aligned as neatly and some wiggling of controls when resizing windows.. Right now I don't find it impacts on the game too much and given it'll require a lot of focus and time to write I'd prefer to have stronger gameplay before starting it.